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What is ‘reality’?

My appreciation for Roger Penrose’s essay asking “What is reality?” was diminished because he gave no clear-cut definition of what he means by “reality” (18 November, p 32).

As a result, the discussion seemed like nothing so much as an overview of the implicit etymology and current range of English-language meanings of that word. One can easily imagine dictionary definitions that either include or exclude physical events at the quantum scale, or human mental events such as unexpressed thoughts.

I am not a linguist, but I suspect that the words for “reality” in other languages may not exactly coincide …